Remembering and Forgetting

Memory is selective. This map features remembering and forgetting as two modes of dealing with political violence during Austrofascism and Nazism on memorials since 1945. Mnemonic actors decide to whom they dedicate a memorial and what these memorials address.

We differentiate between memorials that address political violence (remembering) and memorials that omit political violence (forgetting). A memorial dedicated to Bruno Kreisky that mentions his imprisonment under Austrofascist rule, we classified as a sign of remembrance. A memorial that neither addresses this aspect of his life nor his experience of expulsion and exile during Nazism, we classified as a sign of forgetting.

This approach allows us to investigate at which time, and where, which kinds of political violence were remembered by mnemonic actors and which they omitted in public. We can thereby detect thematic, temporal, and spatial patterns of remembering and forgetting.

Space

Memorials shape public space. Placing memorials in the public is a means of transforming individual and social into collective memory and of building spaces of remembrance. It is bound to availability, which requires either public designation or private permission. Conflict and failure are possible on both sides.

We consider memorials in the streetscape, on facades of buildings, and in parks as fully public, whereas we categorize memorials as semi-public when they are located within companies, other buildings, and cemeteries, thereby only accessible with restrictions.

Which parts of the city provided favorable conditions for memorialization? Is there a difference between remembered groups in terms of full publicity and semi-publicity? The relative location of memorials can indicate hierarchies within the given culture of remembrance and the importance and relevance attributed to particular memorials.

Place

Memorials signify places and relate people to places in a distinctive way. Metaphorically, places are stores of local histories, which people can reveal by “activity of memorialization” (James Young) and “memory work” (Karen Till). This map features historical meanings of places which mnemonic actors articulated, wished to remember in the present, and to memorialize for the future. Choosing sites and referring to particular historical incidents reveals which kind of knowledge actors wish to produce and represent about the ‘biography’ of a place. Thereby they articulate particular senses of belonging both for the remembered and for themselves.

We classified places referred to as places of social life where they were coded as places of residence, education, work, or culture, and as places of violence where they were coded as places of death or deportation, repression, struggle, and administration.

Type

Memory needs carriers. The types of public memorializing available to mnemonic actors affects their activities profoundly. Prominent memorials require more space, are more expensive, and – in democratic societies – are more likely to trigger controversial public debates than plaques. State and civic mnemonic actors can overcome restrictions of access such as private ownership of buildings by inventing new types that can enlarge the available public space significantly.

In Vienna, such examples of new types of memorializing which improve actors’ agency are the plaques laid in sidewalks and explanation plaques for street and park names. With this map, you can explore which kinds of carrier actors use for memorialization in general and for specific themes of violence. We differentiated between prominent (monument, memorial room, exhibition, art installation) and small (plaque, sidewalk plaques, street plaque, park plaque) types.

Find out whether specific types of memorialization go along with specific periods and subjects, and which spatial effects evolved.

Social Identity

Memorials represent social entanglements. The question of social identity formation is a central issue for studying public memory. The relation between types of founders and to whom they dedicate memorials discloses on which scales of society which perceptions of collective identities have been engendered through memorialization. Moreover, the making of the urban memorial landscape is an important feature of cultural policy, which serves the image-building of a city and its cultural self-representation on local, national, and global scales. Recently, the City of Vienna has begun promoting such memorials as distinct art in public space that positions Vienna not only as a city with a rich cultural heritage but as a city ‘remembering for the future’, too.

Empirically, we distinguished positive from negative identity-building. Positive national, municipal, community, or cross-scale identity-building via memorials refers mostly to resistance fighters and soldiers of liberation. Typically, these monuments praise a sacrifice made by one or more individuals in favor of a collective cause shared by those who remember, be it national, municipal, class-, or community-related. A second frame of memorialization features persecution, generally without bearing similarly positive senses of inspiration for group-related collective identities. Such memorials commemorate mostly victims of antisemitic, racist, and other National Socialist persecutions such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and homosexuals.

We may interpret this in at least two ways: First, as a kind of negative identity-building by self-distancing from the perpetrators and their deeds, Or second, in terms of a broader social and democratic reconstruction of national and transnational identity-building by including hitherto ‘forgotten’ and ‘common’ victims of state violence and discrimination.

Personal Identity

Memorials reflect the state and gender of individuality and collectivity in society. This map traces places of individuality and collectivity produced in memorialization by types of mnemonic actors. As an indicator of individuality, we took the naming of people. You can explore which types of actors disclosed personal identities of the remembered in selected times and at selected places.

A high proportion of naming individuals may indicate either a highly heroic or a civic culture of remembrance. In addition, naming allows for analyzing the gender of public memory. We classified memorials as ‘individual’ when names were given and with the value ‘collective’ where no names were given. We distinguished further between female, male, and universal. We chose the later value for memorials commemorating both men and women. Thus, ‘male collective’ indicates memorials addressing a male group, ‘universal collective’ indicates memorials addressing both men and women as a group, ‘male individual’ addresses a single man, and ‘female individual’ addresses a single woman. Significantly, there are no ‘female collective’ memorials in Vienna.

Founders

Memory needs founders. This map investigates the founding activities of foreign states, federal authorities, municipal authorities, public institutions, and civil society actors by types of memorials. The analysis of actors’ constellations allows for a description of agency in politics of remembrance at given times and within given periods. You can trace how changing sets of founding actors have built the urban memorial landscape of Vienna.

Which types of actors were the driving forces of memorialization at given times and places? Which state actors were present and which were absent, who vanished and who emerged? This map is a tool for identifying memory regimes that represent the prevalent order of actors of memorialization at a given time. Strikingly, national governments hesitated for a long time in building a monument honoring resistance fighters and liberators in the political center of Vienna. The late-coming of universities among public institutions is equally remarkable. However, the absence of types of actors among founders does not always indicate opposition or neglect in general.

Although new memory associations were the organizing agents behind the recent memory boom, individuals from global and local scales demanded the memorials and state institutions continuously supported and backed their activities. You can find more details on founders by hovering the mouse over dots on the map.

POREM – Politics of Remembrance

The project “Politics of Remembrance and the Transition of Public Spaces: A Political and Social Analysis of Vienna” (POREM) investigated the memorial landscape of Vienna dealing with political violence by the Austrofascist (1934-1938) and the National Socialist (1938-1945) regimes. The intention was twofold. On the one hand, we aimed at investigating and identifying temporal, topical, actor-related, and scale-related layers of memorialization that have shaped the whole cityscape and its public spaces from 1945 up to 2015. The subject of this strand consisted of research on all permanent monuments, plaques, exhibitions etc. which we identified, coded, and mapped along a range of spatial, temporal, thematic, formal, and social categories such as group references, gender, and instigators. On the other hand, we aimed at exploring in depth the evolution of crucial places and spaces of memory in order to understand their creation, transformation, and usage. This data visualization deals with the first strand of the project. It offers interactive maps allowing the user to define temporal, spatial, social, and thematic factors for drawing specific maps of remembrance (and of forgetting too).

About the data

Our data derives from a survey of all relevant permanent memorials within the outlined temporal, thematic, and spatial frame. As memorials, we considered monuments, sculptures, plaques, explanatory plaques for street- and park-naming, plaques in the sidewalk, exhibitions, memorial rooms, arts installations, and graves. We extracted information from existing catalogs published by Erich Fein in 19741, the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance in 19982 and 20013, Peter Autengruber and Ursula Schwarz in 20134, registers of memorials under public custodial care provided by the department MA7 of the city administration, registers of explanatory street plaques and park plaques provided by the departments MA28 and MA42 of the city administration, the media database of the Austrian Press Agency (APA), databases of public institutions such as the Vienna Regional and Municipal Archives, the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, Kunst im Öffentlichen Raum (KÖR), the education platform erinnern.at, media and databases of survivors’, veterans’ and memory associations, of universities, schools, and museums.

In addition, we rechecked data by sending questionnaires to frequent founders of memorials. Details on founders and a list of sources for each memorial can be found within the respective memorial description on the Wien Geschichte Wiki (Kategorie: Erinnern), a German-language mapping project we are conducting in cooperation with the Vienna City Library. District by district, we then explored all memorials in the urban landscape. Field research not only resulted in the discovery of further memorials and additional data on the placement of memorials, but above all revealed whether they still existed or had been either removed or replaced of which we found around 130. With this additional data and on the basis of photographs, we analyzed and coded the memorials along a range of spatial, temporal, thematic, formal, and social subjects, as presented in the tabs. We decided to count multiple “stones of remembrance” in the sidewalk in front of a building as one act of memorialization if they were laid at the same time.

From the raw data of more than 2,000 cases, we decided to exclude temporary memorials and to discontinue considering individual graves because collecting basic data such as the year of erection or year of dissolution turned out to be impractical. We did not take into account war memorials exclusively dedicated to fallen Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers because most of these memorials were adaptions of already existing World War I memorials. We did take into account memorials for Allied soldiers who fell during the liberation and surveyed memorials with dedications to civilian victims of war such as for victims of Allied bombing. Our final data set consisted of 1,680 memorials, with 50 % having been created from 2005 until 2015.

Download the data

How to use this web application

Explore seven decades of Vienna’s Culture of Remembrance by navigating the timeline (1945-2015). In order to browse the memorials in the map below, simply select one of the predefined points in time (indicated in white and dark orange) or activate a particular period (grey and light orange). We have extracted these periods from the data and call them “layers of memorialization”. You can also use the sliders to select any period of time. The area chart in the background of the timeline shows the number of memorials founded during a particular year.

The map shows the memorials with respect to the timeline selection by different categories (Remembering and Forgetting, Space, Place, Type, Social Identity, Personal Identity, Founders). A short text (next to the map) explains the meaning of the selected category. Please note that not each and every memorial is depicted in each category. Selecting the category Remembering and Forgetting you are shown all memorials which address or omit Austrofascism and/or National Socialism. With any of the other categories selected, the map will contain only memorials which address political violence and are relevant for the specific category. It is possible to reduce the number of places shown by filtering according to various criteria, which are listed in the tab on the left side of the map section.

A frequency chart below the description text indicates the selected number of places shown in the map. Note: The histogram on founders gives numbers of participations in founding activities for each category. Thus, the total amount of participations differs from the numbers of places given on the map.

Finally, the interactive map provides information about the selected memorials. Hovering over the map will indicate the number of memorials by municipal districts with respect to the actual category and filter settings. Detailed information about each and every place mapped can be gained by selecting individual points after zooming into the map.

Time periods and events

Austrofascism (1933-1938)

Following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the proclamation of a democratic Republic on November 12, 1918, Austria was governed by a range of party coalitions. Between 1920 and 1933, the Christian Social Party held the chancellery. In Vienna, the Social Democrats governed with strong popular support and built ‘Red Vienna’, a worldwide model of municipal Socialism.

Against the background of a deep economic and political crisis in March 1933, the Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß exploited a deadlock situation to eliminate the parliament and inaugurate an authoritarian state. The government issued a ban on political assemblies and protests and dissolved the Republican Schutzbund, the paramilitary organization of the Social Democratic Party, as well as the Communist and the National Socialist parties.

In February 1934, Social Democrats in Upper Austria, Vienna, and Styria resisted against further repression by the federal government. After a short civil war resulting in around 360 deaths, the Social Democratic Party was banned. Some of its leaders were executed, others escaped into exile. In May 1934, Dollfuß, who had close ties with the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, proclaimed a new constitution based on four principles: Christian, German, Federal, Corporative. In July 1934, Dollfuß was killed during a National Socialist coup d’etat, which failed.

There is an ongoing debate about the naming (Austrofascism, Corporate State, Dollfuß-Schuschnigg regime) and the classification of the regime (e.g. semi-Fascism, imitation Fascism, authoritarian regime).

Please note that there are two signs of remembrance dating back to the period before 1945: The Memorial for fallen police forces 1934 at the Central Cemetery (Section 71F) from 1934, and the Relief Engelbert Dollfuß in St. Michael Church from 1937. These two items are not represented in the timeline and map above. Nonwithstanding, the POREM dataset includes both places.

The Anschluss (1938)

Opposed by outlawed Social Democrats as well as by outlawed National Socialists, the Austrofascist regime remained without strong popular support. After Hitler strengthened his ties to the Italian Fascist leader Mussolini, the Austrian regime drifted into political isolation.

Hitler pressured the Austrian regime to accept National Socialists such as Arthur Seyß-Inquart into the government. Among the populace, a union with Nazi Germany received ever more support. While Austrian National Socialists prepared the takeover from within, Chancellor Schuschnigg ruled out armed resistance against German troops and resigned on March 11, 1938. Seyß-Inquart formed a new government and, the following day, German troops entered Austria.

On March 13, the new government proclaimed a “Law on the Reunion of Austria with the German Reich”. On March 15, Hitler held a speech at the Heldenplatz in front of an enthusiastic crowd. Almost 700,000 Austrians joined the NSDAP.

National Socialism (1938-1945)

Compared with state repression between 1933 and 1938, the National Socialist regime and its political police, the Gestapo, used state force far more intensely against those it considered political opponents and against those it classified as enemies of or incompatible with National Socialist society (the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’). The Nazi judicial system executed around 600 political opponents including disobedient Wehrmacht soldiers in Vienna.

According to the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), around 3,700 Austrian opponents and resistance fighters fell victim to Nazi persecution. The majority died in concentration camps. With around 170,000 registered members, Vienna had the largest Jewish community in the German-speaking world and the third-largest in Europe. Beginning as early as the days of the Anschluss, Nazis and ordinary citizens perpetrated widespread antisemitic violence in the streets. Non-Jewish Viennese citizens benefited from the ‘Aryanization’ of apartments, shops, and factories. Very soon, with the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung, SS officer Adolf Eichmann and his mostly Austrian staff established a model of systematic deprivation, expulsion, forced emigration, local displacement, and ghetto-like resettlement in Vienna, which in 1941 operated the mass deportations into concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and Belarus.

Of some 200,000 Viennese citizens classified by the Nazis as Jews, 48,000 were deported, more than 60,000 were murdered, and by the end of 1945, the Jewish community registered only 3,955 members. The systematic cleansing of the urban populace (or in Nazi terms the ‘Volkskörper’) hit the Sinti and Roma population similarly severely. Furthermore, in the field of social and health policy, the regime killed around 10,000 inhabitants.

As part of a policy of social discipline, the Gestapo and the criminal police systematically persecuted laborers for infringements of employment, homosexuals, so-called antisocial people, and people who had committed criminal offences. Members and sympathizers of the Communist party were among the most active in resisting National Socialist rule.

Liberation (1945)

Vienna was liberated by the 3rd Ukrainian Front of the Red Army. The battle of Vienna started on April 5 and lasted until April 13. On April 27, the Socialist Party (SPÖ), the Christian Social People’s Party (ÖVP), and the Communist Party (KPÖ) together proclaimed an independent and democratic Republic. The NSDAP was abolished and banned, its members were registered and excluded from voting. In July 1945, the Allies established four occupation zones in Austria and in Vienna. The first district was the only district under shared control.

In November 1945, the first democratic elections took place. On the federal level, the ÖVP received a share of 49.8 % of the vote, the SPÖ 44.6 %, and the KPÖ 5.4 %. The municipal elections in Vienna resulted in a dominant position of the SPÖ (57 %) ahead of the ÖVP (34 %) and KPÖ (7.9 %). In the second federal elections in 1949, most of the former National Socialists were allowed to vote. With 44 %, the ÖVP remained the strongest party ahead of the SPÖ (38.7 %) and the newly founded right-wing party VdU (11.7 %), the predecessor of the Freedom Party (FPÖ).

Antifascism and its Contestation (1945-1956)

The first layer of memorialization represents early nation-building efforts based on antifascism and anti-Nazism during the Allied occupation. Memorials were dedicated to resistance fighters and opponents to National Socialism and Austrofascism.

The dominant mnemonic actors were parties, businesses, and their staff, and municipal authorities who cultivated rather sectional than shared cultures of remembrance. Federal authorities displayed very few activities of memorialization.

Generally, Austria was portrayed as a victim of homemade Fascism and/or Nazi German oppression.

After 1949, antifascism faced increasing contestation. The 1950s were politically dominated by politics of societal und political integration of former National Socialists, SS, and Wehrmacht soldiers, which brought a relative decline of antifascist and anti-Nazi memorialization while veterans’ associations established ever more memorials dedicated exclusively to fallen Wehrmacht soldiers.

State Treaty (1955)

On May 15, 1955, the Austrian government, the USA, the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom signed the State Treaty, ending the occupation. Austria gained full sovereignty as an independent and democratic nation state.

The government declared it would not seek any form of union with Germany nor to allow any reactivation of National Socialist or Fascist organizations, and to guarantee the rights of national minorities. In the face of the Cold War, on October 26, 1955 the Austrian parliament voted for a law on the “everlasting neutrality” of Austria.

Memory Conflict and Pacification (1956-1976)

The second layer of memorialization was shaped by an intensified contestation of antifascism and anti-Nazism, yet very few memorials were added. In 1965, the Parliament declared October 26 to be the national holiday.

In the run-up to the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the Second Republic, violent clashes between antifascists on the one side and right-wing extremists and Wehrmacht or Nazi apologists on the other side resulted in the death of the resistance veteran Ernst Kirchweger. From the viewpoint of federal politics, the riots marked a negative highpoint of a polarized or fractured memory regime.

To counter further divisions, governments on federal and municipal levels aimed at pacifying memory conflicts through a culture of uncontested coexistence of opposing narratives of the past. Generally, official politics of remembrance were guided by a broad recognition of victimhood and acquittal of the war generation. All efforts were directed towards depoliticizing memory and appealing to forget past misdeeds in favor of the formation of a new national identity. As in the following layer, racial and social persecution was not a subject of public memorialization.

Segregation and Omission (1976-1988)

The third layer of memorialization developed from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s. Generally, the quantity of newly erected memorials was slightly higher than in layer 2, but omissions outweighed addressing political violence on relevant memorials throughout.

Activities of memorializing political violence remained rather segregated from overall society, taking place within a niche of survivors’ associations and veterans of the resistance and their associations and institutions. At the end of this period, public conflicts and scandals were already being provoked by some projected memorials, such as the Monument against War and Fascism, which became a prelude to the Waldheim affair in 1986.

Waldheim Election (1986)

In 1986, presidential elections were to be held. The candidate of the Christian Social ÖVP was Kurt Waldheim, a former General Secretary of the United Nations, while Health Minister Kurt Steyrer ran for the SPÖ.

Rather unexpectedly, Waldheim’s World War II service became the central topic of the election campaign. In his autobiography, he had passed over this issue. Investigations of journalists revealed that he had served as an intelligence officer with Wehrmacht units involved in crimes against the Jewish populations, partisans, and civilians in Greece and Yugoslavia.

Waldheim responded to his critics with comments such as “Ich habe im Krieg nichts anderes getan als hunderttausende Österreicher auch, nämlich meine Pflicht als Soldat erfüllt.“ (Like hundreds of thousands of other Austrians, I only fullfilled my duty as a soldier during the war.)

Against the background of an emerging international interest in the Holocaust and in questions such as compensation and restitution, Waldheim’s attitude became symbolic of Austria’s shortcomings in dealing with its National Socialist past after 1945. However, the sentiments of the populace were broadly in favor of Waldheim, and he won the election. On the international level, Waldheim’s election was not looked upon favorably, and he remained isolated throughout his presidency.

Memorial Years (1988-1996)

1988, the fiftieth anniversary of the “Anschluss”, witnessed the greatest number of signs of remembrance erected annually since 1949.

In the wake of the Waldheim affair, the invention of a national commemorative year was a first response of the federal and municipal governments to a deep crisis of politics of history induced by its sudden internationalization and European pressure on Austria and the Austrians to face their Nazi past.

For the first time, a number of memorial plaques were erected which addressed antisemitic violence such as the destruction of synagogues during the November Pogrom in 1938. The other half of memorials were dedicated to resistance fighters, therefore serving to reconstruct the antifascist victim narrative of the early postwar years. This ambivalence is also present in the famous Monument against War and Fascism by Alfred Hrdlicka, unveiled in 1988.

Neither the year 1988 nor the following political speeches of high-rank politicians on Austria’s shared responsibility had a lasting impact on new signs of remembrance addressing Nazi political violence.

In 1995, April 27 became the central day of remembrance (the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of independence) while many European countries commemorated the end of World War II and the liberation from National Socialism on May 8. Although evincing an increase in memorialization, there was a recurrence of omitting Nazi violence, especially antisemitic violence.

Accession to the EU (1995)

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Austria aimed to join the European community. European efforts to bring the Nazi extermination policy to the center of politics of remembrance had to be taken into account if the country wanted to escape the international isolation of the Waldheim years.

When Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (SPÖ) in 1991 proclaimed the co-responsibility of Austrians for Nazi crimes, he explicitly presented the challenge for Austria to come to terms with its past as a contribution to a new political culture in Europe. In 1994, a majority of 66% of Austrians voted for the accession, which was effected on January 1, 1995.

Forgotten Victims (1996-2006)

This layer represents the beginning of the political, social, and mnemonic integration of so-called “forgotten victims” of Nazi political violence. It marks a first step of leaving exclusive national and communal politics of history behind and taking international developments more explicitly into account.

In 1995, the Austrian parliament recognized several previously “forgotten” groups of victims of National Socialism and set up the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism. The National Fund increasingly developed into the external face representing a redefined Austrian policy of the past. It supports civil society memory projects in Austria and abroad as well.

At the same time, controversies on the Wehrmacht and the co-responsibility of Austrians for Nazi crimes, and questions about restitution of expropriated buildings and valuables continued to be important issues of public debate, triggering for example the formation of the Austrian Historical Commission. The long dispute on the memorial to the Austrian victims of the Shoah in the city center (unveiled in 2000) reflects the ambivalences of this layer rather well. Public institutions such as schools and universities began to commemorate persecuted pupils, students, teachers, artists, and academics. Omissions of political violence declined.

When the conservative People’s Party ÖVP formed a coalition government with the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Jörg Haider in February 2000, it met with strong European opposition and diplomatic sanctions in the wake of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust that took place at the same time. Thus, efforts to balance (inter)national apprehensions of a backlash by concluding international restitution and compensation agreements, internal divisions inside the federal coalition and competing policies by the Social Democrats at the municipal level characterized politics of remembrance after 2000.

Stockholm Conference (2000)

From January 26 to 28, 2000, high-ranking politicians from more than forty countries gathered at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust with civil society actors, survivors, and historians to discuss measures against genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. Its closing declaration emphasized the importance of education, remembrance, and research about the Holocaust.

Politicians from the US, Israel, and Europe present at the Forum strongly criticized the leader of the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party Jörg Haider and his participation in a governing coalition in Austria. Haider did not enter the government and resigned as head of his party, but despite international protests the People’s Party formed a coalition government with the Freedom Party. In 2001, Austria became a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Memory Boom (2006-2015)

The last layer represents the so-called memory boom. The year 2006 was the first time that the number of newly erected signs of remembrance following a “commemorative year” did not noticeably decrease, and even increased sharply until 2008, thereafter remaining at a high level that had not occurred until then. Omissions of political violence rapidly decreased pro rata, disappearing almost entirely by 2014.

The founders of the majority of the new signs of remembrance were new memory actors in civil society with transnational ties to survivors and family members of persecuted persons living abroad. They erected a large number of small signs remembering persecution at authentic sites, for example where persecuted and murdered Jews had lived and worked.

The reshaping of the Heldenplatz with the transformation of the Austrian Heroes’ Memorial and the erection of a memorial to Wehrmacht deserters was a central feature of this layer too.

The return of remembrance into the city came at a point when the categories of personal guilt and responsibility were not applicable anymore. The memorial projects are widely uncontested and mark the latest generational change with the disappearance of survivors and the departure of children of National Socialists, their followers, and Wehrmacht soldiers from professional life.

With the formation of the SPÖ-ÖVP coalition on the federal level (2007) and a SPÖ-Green Party coalition on the municipal scale (2009) the political framework for public politics of remembrance changed profoundly. Among SPÖ, ÖVP, and the Green Party, a widely consensual politics of remembrance was favored, fostering sentiments for a politically united Europe as a lesson learned from the past while the European integration project itself was in a deep economic and political crisis.

Additional support by Johanna Urban, Moritz Wein, Sohaib Gondal, Thomas Schautzer, Johanna Taufner & students of the research seminars „Politics of Remembrance“ in 2015 at the Department of Government, University of Vienna.

English proof-reading and feedback: Tim Corbett

We wish to thank everybody who provided us with information on the memorials.

POREM web application by

Impressum & Contact

Politics of Remembrance

The POREM project investigated the memorial landscape of Vienna, dealing with political violence by the Austrofascist (1934-1938) and the National Socialist (1938-1945) regimes. This data visualisation offers interactive maps allowing the user to define temporal, spatial, social, and thematic factors for drawing specific maps of remembrance and of forgetting.

For more information about the project and how to use the timeline and map, please see the detailed “about”-section below the map.

This interactive data visualisation works better in landscape mode.

Use the timeline to navigate through the history of Vienna’s culture of remembrance

Explore places of remembrance in the interactive map

Austrofascism

Following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the proclamation of a democratic Republic on November 12, 1918, Austria was governed by a range of party coalitions. Between 1920 and 1933, the Christian Social Party held the chancellery. In Vienna, the Social Democrats governed with strong popular support and built ‘Red Vienna’, a worldwide model of municipal Socialism. Against the background of a deep economic and political crisis in March 1933, the Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß exploited a deadlock situation to eliminate the parliament and inaugurate an authoritarian state. The government issued a ban on political assemblies and protests and dissolved the Republican Schutzbund, the paramilitary organization of the Social Democratic Party, as well as the Communist and the National Socialist parties. In February 1934, Social Democrats in Upper Austria, Vienna, and Styria resisted against further repression by the federal government. After a short civil war resulting in around 360 deaths, the Social Democratic Party was banned. Some of its leaders were executed, others escaped into exile. In May 1934, Dollfuß, who had close ties with the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, proclaimed a new constitution based on four principles: Christian, German, Federal, Corporative. In July 1934, Dollfuß was killed during a National Socialist coup d’etat, which failed. There is an ongoing debate about the naming (Austrofascism, Corporate State, Dollfuß-Schuschnigg regime) and the classification of the regime (e.g. semi-Fascism, imitation Fascism, authoritarian regime).

The Anschluss

Opposed by outlawed Social Democrats as well as by outlawed National Socialists, the Austrofascist regime remained without strong popular support. After Hitler strengthened his ties to the Italian Fascist leader Mussolini, the Austrian regime drifted into political isolation. Hitler pressured the Austrian regime to accept National Socialists such as Arthur Seyß-Inquart into the government. Among the populace, a union with Nazi Germany received ever more support. While Austrian National Socialists prepared the takeover from within, Chancellor Schuschnigg ruled out armed resistance against German troops and resigned on March 11, 1938. Seyß-Inquart formed a new government and, the following day, German troops entered Austria. On March 13, the new government proclaimed a “Law on the Reunion of Austria with the German Reich”. On March 15, Hitler held a speech at the Heldenplatz in front of an enthusiastic crowd. Almost 700,000 Austrians joined the NSDAP.

National Socialism

Compared with state repression between 1933 and 1938, the National Socialist regime and its political police, the Gestapo, used state force far more intensely against those it considered political opponents and against those it classified as enemies of or incompatible with National Socialist society (the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’). The Nazi judicial system executed around 600 political opponents including disobedient Wehrmacht soldiers in Vienna. According to the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), around 3,700 Austrian opponents and resistance fighters fell victim to Nazi persecution. The majority died in concentration camps. With around 170,000 registered members, Vienna had the largest Jewish community in the German-speaking world and the third-largest in Europe. Beginning as early as the days of the Anschluss, Nazis and ordinary citizens perpetrated widespread antisemitic violence in the streets. Non-Jewish Viennese citizens benefited from the ‘Aryanization’ of apartments, shops, and factories. Very soon, with the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung, SS officer Adolf Eichmann and his mostly Austrian staff established a model of systematic deprivation, expulsion, forced emigration, local displacement, and ghetto-like resettlement in Vienna, which in 1941 operated the mass deportations into concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Of some 200,000 Viennese citizens classified by the Nazis as Jews, 48,000 were deported, more than 60,000 were murdered, and by the end of 1945, the Jewish community registered only 3,955 members. The systematic cleansing of the urban populace (or in Nazi terms the ‘Volkskörper’) hit the Sinti and Roma population similarly severely. Furthermore, in the field of social and health policy, the regime killed around 10,000 inhabitants. As part of a policy of social discipline, the Gestapo and the criminal police systematically persecuted laborers for infringements of employment, homosexuals, so-called antisocial people, and people who had committed criminal offences. Members and sympathizers of the Communist party were among the most active in resisting National Socialist rule.

Liberation

Vienna was liberated by the 3rd Ukrainian Front of the Red Army. The battle of Vienna started on April 5 and lasted until April 13. On April 27, the Socialist Party (SPÖ), the Christian Social People’s Party (ÖVP), and the Communist Party (KPÖ) together proclaimed an independent and democratic Republic. The NSDAP was abolished and banned, its members were registered and excluded from voting.

In July 1945, the Allies established four occupation zones in Austria and in Vienna. The first district was the only district under shared control. In November 1945, the first democratic elections took place. On the federal level, the ÖVP received a share of 49.8 % of the vote, the SPÖ 44.6 %, and the KPÖ 5.4 %. The municipal elections in Vienna resulted in a dominant position of the SPÖ (57 %) ahead of the ÖVP (34 %) and KPÖ (7.9 %). In the second federal elections in 1949, most of the former National Socialists were allowed to vote. With 44 %, the ÖVP remained the strongest party ahead of the SPÖ (38.7 %) and the newly founded right-wing party VdU (11.7 %), the predecessor of the Freedom Party (FPÖ).

Antifascism and its Contestation

The first layer of memorialization represents early nation-building efforts based on antifascism and anti-Nazism during the Allied occupation. Memorials were dedicated to resistance fighters and opponents to National Socialism and Austrofascism. The dominant mnemonic actors were parties, businesses, and their staff, and municipal authorities who cultivated rather sectional than shared cultures of remembrance. Federal authorities displayed very few activities of memorialization. Generally, Austria was portrayed as a victim of homemade Fascism and/or Nazi German oppression. After 1949, antifascism faced increasing contestation. The 1950s were politically dominated by politics of societal und political integration of former National Socialists, SS, and Wehrmacht soldiers, which brought a relative decline of antifascist and anti-Nazi memorialization while veterans’ associations established ever more memorials dedicated exclusively to fallen Wehrmacht soldiers.

State Treaty

On May 15, 1955, the Austrian government, the USA, the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom signed the State Treaty, ending the occupation. Austria gained full sovereignty as an independent and democratic nation state. The government declared it would not seek any form of union with Germany nor to allow any reactivation of National Socialist or Fascist organizations, and to guarantee the rights of national minorities. In the face of the Cold War, on October 26, 1955 the Austrian parliament voted for a law on the “everlasting neutrality” of Austria.

Memory Conflict and Pacification

The second layer of memorialization was shaped by an intensified contestation of antifascism and anti-Nazism, yet very few memorials were added. In 1965, the Parliament declared October 26 to be the national holiday. In the run-up to the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the Second Republic, violent clashes between antifascists on the one side and right-wing extremists and Wehrmacht or Nazi apologists on the other side resulted in the death of the resistance veteran Ernst Kirchweger. From the viewpoint of federal politics, the riots marked a negative highpoint of a polarized or fractured memory regime. To counter further divisions, governments on federal and municipal levels aimed at pacifying memory conflicts through a culture of uncontested coexistence of opposing narratives of the past. Generally, official politics of remembrance were guided by a broad recognition of victimhood and acquittal of the war generation. All efforts were directed towards depoliticizing memory and appealing to forget past misdeeds in favor of the formation of a new national identity. As in the following layer, racial and social persecution was not a subject of public memorialization.

Segregation and Omission

The third layer of memorialization developed from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s. Generally, the quantity of newly erected memorials was slightly higher than in layer 2, but omissions outweighed addressing political violence on relevant memorials throughout. Activities of memorializing political violence remained rather segregated from overall society, taking place within a niche of survivors’ associations and veterans of the resistance and their associations and institutions. At the end of this period, public conflicts and scandals were already being provoked by some projected memorials, such as the Monument against War and Fascism, which became a prelude to the Waldheim affair in 1986.

Waldheim Election

In 1986, presidential elections were to be held. The candidate of the Christian Social ÖVP was Kurt Waldheim, a former General Secretary of the United Nations, while Health Minister Kurt Steyrer ran for the SPÖ. Rather unexpectedly, Waldheim’s World War II service became the central topic of the election campaign. In his autobiography, he had passed over this issue. Investigations of journalists revealed that he had served as an intelligence officer with Wehrmacht units involved in crimes against the Jewish populations, partisans, and civilians in Greece and Yugoslavia.

Waldheim responded to his critics with comments such as “Ich habe im Krieg nichts anderes getan als hunderttausende Österreicher auch, nämlich meine Pflicht als Soldat erfüllt.“ (Like hundreds of thousands of other Autrians, I only fullfilled my duty as a soldier during the war.) Against the background of an emerging international interest in the Holocaust and in questions such as compensation and restitution, Waldheim’s attitude became symbolic of Austria’s shortcomings in dealing with its National Socialist past after 1945.

However, the sentiments of the populace were broadly in favor of Waldheim, and he won the election. On the international level, Waldheim’s election was not looked upon favorably, and he remained isolated throughout his presidency.

Memorial Years"

1988, the fiftieth anniversary of the "Anschluss", witnessed the greatest number of signs of remembrance erected annually since 1949. In the wake of the Waldheim affair, the invention of a national commemorative year was a first response of the federal and municipal governments to a deep crisis of politics of history induced by its sudden internationalization and European pressure on Austria and the Austrians to face their Nazi past. For the first time, a number of memorial plaques were erected which addressed antisemitic violence such as the destruction of synagogues during the November Pogrom in 1938. The other half of memorials were dedicated to resistance fighters, therefore serving to reconstruct the antifascist victim narrative of the early postwar years. This ambivalence is also present in the famous Monument against War and Fascism by Alfred Hrdlicka, unveiled in 1988. Neither the year 1988 nor the following political speeches of high-rank politicians on Austria’s shared responsibility had a lasting impact on new signs of remembrance addressing Nazi political violence. In 1995, April 27 became the central day of remembrance (the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of independence) while many European countries commemorated the end of World War II and the liberation from National Socialism on May 8. Although evincing an increase in memorialization, there was a recurrence of omitting Nazi violence, especially antisemitic violence.

Accession to the EU

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Austria aimed to join the European community. European efforts to bring the Nazi extermination policy to the center of politics of remembrance had to be taken into account if the country wanted to escape the international isolation of the Waldheim years.

When Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (SPÖ) in 1991 proclaimed the co-responsibility of Austrians for Nazi crimes, he explicitly presented the challenge for Austria to come to terms with its past as a contribution to a new political culture in Europe. In 1994, a majority of 66 % of Austrians voted for the accession, which was effected on January 1, 1995.

Forgotten Victims

This layer represents the beginning of the political, social, and mnemonic integration of so-called “forgotten victims” of Nazi political violence. It marks a first step of leaving exclusive national and communal politics of history behind and taking international developments more explicitly into account. In 1995, the Austrian parliament recognized several previously “forgotten” groups of victims of National Socialism and set up the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism. The National Fund increasingly developed into the external face representing a redefined Austrian policy of the past. It supports civil society memory projects in Austria and abroad as well. At the same time, controversies on the Wehrmacht and the co-responsibility of Austrians for Nazi crimes, and questions about restitution of expropriated buildings and valuables continued to be important issues of public debate, triggering for example the formation of the Austrian Historical Commission. The long dispute on the memorial to the Austrian victims of the Shoah in the city center (unveiled in 2000) reflects the ambivalences of this layer rather well. Public institutions such as schools and universities began to commemorate persecuted pupils, students, teachers, artists, and academics. Omissions of political violence declined. When the conservative People’s Party ÖVP formed a coalition government with the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Jörg Haider in February 2000, it met with strong European opposition and diplomatic sanctions in the wake of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust that took place at the same time. Thus, efforts to balance (inter)national apprehensions of a backlash by concluding international restitution and compensation agreements, internal divisions inside the federal coalition and competing policies by the Social Democrats at the municipal level characterized politics of remembrance after 2000.

Stockholm Conference

From January 26 to 28, 2000, high-ranking politicians from more than forty countries gathered at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust with civil society actors, survivors, and historians to discuss measures against genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. Its closing declaration emphasized the importance of education, remembrance, and research about the Holocaust.

Politicians from the US, Israel, and Europe present at the Forum strongly criticized the leader of the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party Jörg Haider and his participation in a governing coalition in Austria. Haider did not enter the government and resigned as head of his party, but despite international protests the People’s Party formed a coalition government with the Freedom Party. In 2001, Austria became a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Memory Boom

The last layer represents the so-called memory boom. The year 2006 was the first time that the number of newly erected signs of remembrance following a “commemorative year” did not noticeably decrease, and even increased sharply until 2008, thereafter remaining at a high level that had not occurred until then. Omissions of political violence rapidly decreased pro rata, disappearing almost entirely by 2014. The founders of the majority of the new signs of remembrance were new memory actors in civil society with transnational ties to survivors and family members of persecuted persons living abroad. They erected a large number of small signs remembering persecution at authentic sites, for example where persecuted and murdered Jews had lived and worked. The reshaping of the Heldenplatz with the transformation of the Austrian Heroes’ Memorial and the erection of a memorial to Wehrmacht deserters was a central feature of this layer too. The return of remembrance into the city came at a point when the categories of personal guilt and responsibility were not applicable anymore. The memorial projects are widely uncontested and mark the latest generational change with the disappearance of survivors and the departure of children of National Socialists, their followers, and Wehrmacht soldiers from professional life. With the formation of the SPÖ-ÖVP coalition on the federal level (2007) and a SPÖ-Green Party coalition on the municipal scale (2009) the political framework for public politics of remembrance changed profoundly. Among SPÖ, ÖVP, and the Green Party, a widely consensual politics of remembrance was favored, fostering sentiments for a politically united Europe as a lesson learned from the past while the European integration project itself was in a deep economic and political crisis.